Pursuing National Liberation and Socialism: 

A Conversation with Oscar Figuera

by CIRA PASCUAL MARQUINA

Oscar Figuera is the general secretary of the Venezuelan Communist Party [PCV]. As a 17-year-old metal worker in Aragua state, he cut his teeth as a union organizer in the Venezuelan Worker’s Unitary Central [CUTV, the PCV-led union federation], becoming the union’s general secretary in 1986. Today, Figuera is a member of the National Assembly [2016-2020 term]. In this exclusive interview, Figuera talks to VA about both the recent transformations of Venezuelan capitalism and the Popular Revolutionary Alternative, a broad coalition that aims to regroup leftwing Chavista forces in a front that is independent from the PSUV.

In 2018 the PCV, the [Homeland For All party] PPT, and all other parties of the Great Patriotic Pole [GPP] supported Nicolas Maduro’s presidential campaign. However, in recent months the PCV, the PPT, and other political organizations joined forces to create the Popular Revolutionary Alternative [APR]. This electoral coalition will present independent candidates for the December 6 parliamentary elections. What has changed in Venezuelan politics since 2018 and what can you tell us about the APR?

First, I should say that the APR is not an electoral initiative, although in its current configuration it is triggered by the upcoming elections. This is a project with a strategic projection that must reach beyond the electoral process. For us, the electoral process is a tactical opportunity to regroup forces, revolutionary currents, and other expressions of grassroots Chavismo. It’s about building a space for the joint construction of a popular agenda.

In fact, the APR is an outgrowth of prior coalitions such as the Popular Revolutionary Bloc [Bloque Popular Revolucionario] and the Patriotic Anti-imperialist Alliance [Alianza Patriotica Anti-imperialista]. The objective of the APR and its precursors is bringing together the working-class, campesino, and communard forces in a revolutionary way.

In other words, our strategic objective is not the December 6 elections, but regrouping the popular revolutionary currents that identify themselves with Chavez’s most advanced proposals.

We have been careful in our way of proceeding because we see imperialism as the main enemy of the Venezuelan people, and that is why we supported Maduro’s 2018 presidential bid. But the truth is that, beyond the capitalist crisis, the exhaustion of the Venezuelan dependent rentier model [of economic development], and the impact of the imperialist siege, there is plenty of evidence pointing to a real political shift in the project of the governing forces [in Venezuela].

Chavez’s death was a tremendous blow to the Bolivarian Process. In fact, it affected the whole continent – and I would say the globe – but obviously the biggest and hardest impact was on the Venezuelan project.

The progressive processes that came to power in Latin America over the last couple of decades were reformist and social-democratic in character. The processes had a low ceiling, and when they reached it, they began to slide back. Nonetheless, Chavez’s discourse gave the Bolivarian Process some elements that set it apart from the other processes [ín the continent].

Why? Because Chavez, despite socialism not being built, was convinced that socialism was the path. Today, Chavista politicians talk about socialism in a rote way, but they are not committed to it. Government officials disassociate discourse and practice: they talk about socialism and national liberation, but in real terms the political and economic policies have a liberal bourgeois character.

So, at the end of the day, the class character of the current government differs from that of Chavez’s government.

Our confrontation with the government is not personal. We have no problem with the government’s representatives, taken one at a time… In fact, those who fall into a personalist approach to politics hurt the popular movement by erasing the class character of the confrontation.

Class contradictions, which express themselves in the political and ideological projects, have become more acute. That is why, on the one hand, the PCV calls for a process of demarcation, regrouping, and confrontation when it comes to Venezuela’s internal issues. On the other hand, we call for maintaining unity on the anti-imperialist front.

Yes, and this connects to your previous question. The fracture is not new. Here I will speak on behalf of the PCV. One of the first important differences that we had with the government in its current incarnation is that it considers socialism a matter of speech: it’s not about doing, it’s about saying. This is not a new issue.

In our party’s XV Congress [2017] we decided that, in order to advance, we had to confront the government, define our separate objectives, and accumulate strength. Why did we formulate this orientation? Because we believe that the Venezuelan political project is moving backward, that the strategic project of national liberation and building up to advance towards socialism is broken. We are retreating, and that is only useful for the recomposition of capital.

After that congress, during the 2018 presidential campaign, we had a very heated debate about whether our party should support Nicolas Maduro’s candidacy. Concerns ranged from the government’s economic, labor, and social policies to the existence of rampant corruption and bureaucratism. Further issues were the curtailing of participative and protagonistic democracy as well as the state (and semi-state) control mechanisms that had been put in place to limit the scope of popular organization, or sometimes even liquidate it.

After two days of intense debate, the Communist Party came to the decision that we would support Maduro’s presidential candidacy only if a binding agreement was signed. The binding agreement committed the government to opposing monopolies, reinstating labor rights, and reversing the agrarian policies underway, among other things. In other words, we drafted a document that pointed the way to national liberation, always with socialism as the [ultimate] goal. On February 28, 2018, Nicolas Maduro signed that agreement.

Yet, the government rapidly broke the deal after Maduro’s election. It did so by continuing to implement liberal economic policies and through anti-democratic practices. In the current electoral context, this left us with two options: continuing to endorse a strategic project that goes against the interests of the masses, our principles, and Chavez’s own project; or we could build a popular alternative. We opted for the second possibility.

That is where the APR comes from. It is committed to national liberation and socialism while confronting tame reformism, fascism, and imperialism.

On August 17 the PCV, the PPT, and other organizations officially launched the APR in a press conference, telling the nation that the APR would have one single, independent electoral list for the National Assembly elections. Four days later, Venezuela’s Supreme Court intervened the PPT, the second largest force in the APR, imposing an ad hoc leadership that was willing to participate in an electoral coalition with the PSUV. What can we make of all this?

The Supreme Court meddling in the internal affairs of the PPT is an expression of the class struggle underway. Venezuela is a capitalist country and, as a consequence, the state has a bourgeois character. Furthermore, in the last few years, there has been a change: a new bourgeois nucleus has emerged within the government or in a tight relationship with it. We are talking about a new sector of the bourgeoisie, which employs a socialist discourse, but needs the bourgeois state to continue if it is to maintain its newly-acquired wealth and social privileges.

Many people who got to power with Chavez in ‘98, most of them from middle-class sectors, have joined this bourgeoisie. Their class condition has changed and, in the process, their conscience has shifted. We find the roots of this in the fact that a truly revolutionary organization, capable of directing the Bolivarian Process, did not emerge.

Among the forces in the government, the Supreme Court expresses the interests of those who exercise power now, both political and economic. To retain its [economic] privileges, the enriched sector needs a united electoral ticket, even if that means taking control, through judicial intervention, of a Chavista party like the PPT.

Nonetheless, the APR will go forward, both as a long-term joint project and as an electoral front for the December elections. Of course, the newly-configured PPT will endorse the candidatures imposed by the PSUV, but the APR will present its bid for the National Assembly composed of [the core of the] PPT, the PCV, and all the grassroots, communard, and Chavista organizations that have joined forces.

In the APR, there are no bosses. We are building a common space. As it turns out, only the PCV has a viable ballot [due to the TSJ’s intervention of the PPT], but the candidates that will appear on our ballot represent an alliance with forces that have a revolutionary perspective and share strategic objectives.

In other words, little has changed in the APR since the Supreme Court intervened in the PPT: there is still the collective appreciation that the Bolivarian Process needs to correct its course. The government’s liberal turn is not going to resolve the crisis that affects the destitute masses. Our collective belief is that the APR must express the interests of the dispossessed sectors in these elections and beyond.

You talk about the government’s “liberal turn.” Could you be more precise?

The PSUV – not its bases, but its direction – is rapidly advancing towards the liberalization of the economy in order to guarantee the recomposition of capitalism. This means that privatizations are in vogue, collective bargaining eliminated, and workers’ rights to organize curtailed, while the minimum salary remains under US $2 a month. Meanwhile campesinos – whose right to vacant lands was recognized by Chavez – are violently displaced and the land given to new and old terratenientes [large landowners].

We also see a tendency toward the judicialization of struggles. Campesinos, communards, and workers are put behind bars, while corrupt officials are free and fascists are granted presidential pardons. The case of PDVSA workers Aryenis Torrealba and Alfredo Chirinos is emblematic: they were arrested more than six months ago under bogus charges. Their real crime? They were denouncing important corruption schemes in PDVSA. To this day they remain jailed with no due process.

What is the goal of the electoral struggle at this time? Is the idea to pressure the government? To build a left opposition?

In the Bolivarian Process, elections became the main form of struggle and for the time being, this remains so. The way in which class struggle develops will determine if other forms of struggle emerge.

For us, the December elections are also a tactical moment in the process of regrouping and accumulation of forces. Additionally, elections are a space for ideological struggle. This is all the more important at a time when large swaths of the population are willing to listen. Of course, there are sectarian groups that shut themselves from debate, but there undoubtedly exists a thirst for a popular alternative within Chavismo.

Elections are a space to promote the ideological debate, present proposals, and contrast the programs of each organization. Elections are useful to bring together and recompose forces, and that is precisely what the APR is looking to do. Finally, the National Assembly is also a tribune to defend the interests of the Venezuelan pueblo in the face of liberal reformism in power while denouncing the imperialist aggression.

It is no secret that there are large cracks or rifts within the Bolivarian Process. Without personalizing the matter, who is responsible for the rifts between the Bolivarian government and a wide swath of the popular movement, which includes the PCV?

Let’s go from the general to the particular. The roots of the rupture can be found in the growing class contradictions inside the Bolivarian Process, which widen as the crisis of the dependent, rentier capitalism here pushes more and more of the population into frankly catastrophic conditions.

This is precisely why we don’t personalize the situation. It’s not about X or Y doing this or that. It’s about the class interests within an organization. Each class fraction has a political expression, and those political expressions confront each other. Personalizing these issues hides the essence of the contradiction.

At the end of the day, we don’t know what will happen, but it will be decided by the correlation of forces within the class struggle.

Today, it is common to say that in Venezuela we need unity, using a “fortress under siege” analogy, because of the real danger that US imperialism poses to Venezuela’s sovereignty. How do the APR and the PCV understand unity in this difficult situation?

I’ll talk about the PCV’s conception, since the APR is still under construction and there are ongoing debates.

The PCV understands unity on two levels. On the one hand, there must be an ample anti-imperialist and antifascist alliance, and we understand that that should be the role of the Great Patriotic Pole [GPP]. Instead of attempting to liquidate other patriotic forces, the GPP should be a space for the collective preservation of our sovereignty. Differences at the national level shouldn’t be cause for liquidation. In fact, the GPP has great potential to forge a wide anti-imperialist and antifascist alliance.

On the other hand, there is the need to build a revolutionary unity on the basis of the class interests of the working class, of campesinos, communards, and other popular sectors. Building this kind of unity is urgent so that revolutionary organizations don’t become an appendix of tame reformism.

We have to come together in the context of the anti-imperialist struggle while, at a national level, we must confront the tendencies that want to liberalize the economy.

The APR is precisely the space for building the revolutionary unity of the working class, campesinos, communards, and popular masses, which should also incorporate revolutionary intellectuals and honest sectors of the armed forces.

SOURCE:  https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/14994

Cira Pascual Marquina is a teacher and political organizer in Caracas, and a writer for for Venezuelanalysis.com.

Nature, Science and Revolutionary Struggle

by LOUIS PROYECT COUNTERPUNCH

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

Working my way through John Bellamy Foster’s magisterial “The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology,” it dawned on me that there was a gap in my knowledge. I knew that Marx and Engels were consumed with ecological problems, even though the word wasn’t in their vocabulary. To a large extent, my awareness came from reading another great Foster book, “Marx’s Ecology.” However, I couldn’t help shake the feeling that in between Marx/ Engels and Rachel Carson it was mostly a blur. The failure of the socialist states to support Green values reinforced that feeling. From Chernobyl to the shrinking of the Aral Sea, there was not much to distinguish capitalist and socialist society.

After finishing “The Return of Nature,” that blur gave way to clarity. Foster’s intellectual history shows a chain of thinkers connecting Marx/Engels to today’s greatest ecological thinkers, from Rachel Carson to Barry Commoner. To use a cliché, they stood on the shoulders of giants.

On page 386, we learn that Rachel Carson applied lessons she learned from the Haldane-Oparin to life’s origin. I knew J.B.S. Haldane was a British Marxist scientist but had no clue how important he was to Carson and the ecosocialist movement of today. As for Alexander Oparin, he was a Soviet biochemist who wrote “The Origin of Life.” As for the Haldane-Oparin theory, it explained for the first time how life could have originated out of inorganic matter and why such a process was a singularity. Carson stressed the importance of the theory for her work and for anybody else trying to develop a holistic understanding of the connection between humanity and nature:

From all this we may generalize that, since the beginning of biological time, there has been the closest possible interdependence between the physical environment and the life it sustains. The conditions on the young earth produced life; life then at once modified the conditions of the earth, so that this single extraordinary act of spontaneous generation could not be repeated. In one form or another, action and interaction between life and its surroundings has been going on ever since. (From “Lost Woods”)

In a necessary but controversial leitmotif that appears throughout the book, Foster speaks of the need to apply a dialectical materialist approach to organic life, including homo sapiens in its social aspects. For decades now, dialectical materialism has been a dirty word in Marxism. Engels was supposedly responsible for creating a false philosophy that incorporated the worst, mechanical tendencies in Marxism. Later on, dialectical materialism became a kind of approved quasi-theology in Stalin’s Russia that spread throughout the world. To counteract its influence, Marxist scholars stressed their adherence to historical materialism that bracketed out most of the natural world except when it became an 800-pound gorilla such today when climate change becomes as important a factor as unemployment.

For Marxism to respond adequately to the threat of a Sixth Extinction, dialectical materialism is essential since the growing threats to the natural world threaten the social world. Engels understood this entirely, as indicated by his “The Part played by
Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man.” He wrote, “When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons.” This single sentence encapsulates the thinking of ecologists ever since.

Engels’s essay was part of “The Dialectics of Nature,” a work that is fundamental to Foster’s thesis. In J.B.S. Haldane’s preface to the 1939 edition, he spoke of its laying “particular emphasis on the inter-connection of all processes, and the artificial character of the distinctions which men have drawn, not merely between vertebrates and invertebrates or liquids and gases, but between the different fields of human knowledge such as economics, history, and natural science.” While the book remains relatively obscure within the Marxist corpus, Foster understood the need to place it much closer to the center. It represents Engels’s attempt to synthesize Hegelian dialectics with modern science, especially Darwin’s theories that both Marx and Engels saw as reinforcing their own ideas about social evolution. By separating dialectics from its Hegelian idealist trappings, the methodology helps us understand the natural world.

For both Marx and Engels, the role of nature came into play because the diseases that were ravaging Europe at the time were largely a product of capitalism’s wrenching human beings from their natural, rural existence. As part of primitive accumulation, capitalism dragged farmers into the great industrial slums that bred cholera and other killer diseases, just as it does today.

Among their contemporaries, no other physician was more attuned to the needs of the working class living in unhealthy conditions than Edward Lankester, a friend of the Darwin’s. He led investigations of London’s waters and concluded that organic material was responsible for cholera. He was also a strong supporter of the North in the U.S. Civil War, poor people’s right to a vote, and Irish freedom. In the last decades of his life he devoted himself to public health and working class conditions.

Like Marx, Lankester read soil chemist Justus von Liebig and concluded that the separation of human beings from nature led to soil infertility and the miserable conditions that bred disease in England’s manufacturing centers.

Committed as he was to Darwin’s theories, Lankester encouraged his sons to follow in his footsteps. His son Ray became a zoologist and the Marx’s close friend. In his studies of the natural world, he developed an outlook strikingly similar to what Engels wrote about the alps. In a 1913 article titled “The Effacement of Nature by Man,” he referred to the same kind of despoliation that continues today. “Very few people have any idea of the extent to which man . . . has actively modified the face of Nature, the vast herds of animals he has destroyed, the forests he has burnt up, the deserts he has produced, and the rivers he has polluted.” In North America, the settlers had nearly exterminated, while “Progressive money-making man” of the mining and manufacturing world destroyed trout streams. In his own country, “the Thames mud was blood-red (really ‘blood-red,’ since the colour was due to the same blood-crystals which colour our own blood) with the swarms of a delicate little worms like the earth-worm, which has an exceptional power of living in foul water and nourishing itself upon putrid mud.”

When Lankester wrote these words, he was not an outlier. By 1913, socialism’s popularity was widespread in Britain, even from a Fabian perspective. It did not take reading Marx or Engels to understand that the Thames was an open sewer.

Two non-Marxists became outspoken critics of the environmental devastation. H.G. Wells, best-known for his science fiction sagas, was deeply concerned that the dystopia of “The Time Machine” might be England’s fate if it did not reverse industry’s assault on nature. The other was Julian Huxley, an evolutionary biologist who unfortunately shared Trotsky’s belief that eugenics could help “improve” the human stock. Notwithstanding this flaw, which was endemic in progressive circles in the early 1900s, Huxley’s ecological critique was ahead of his time. It was no accident that both Wells and Huxley were students of Ray Lankester.

In 1929, Wells, his son G. P. Wells, a biology instructor, and Huxley co-authored a 1,400 page book titled “The Science of Life” that warned humanity about theirunless capitalist despoliation of the environment came to an end. They anticipated the current-day warnings about a Sixth Extinction made by scientists today. So dire are the symptoms of collapse today that scientists need no prodding from the left. This excerpt from “The Science of Life” expresses their concerns:

When man comes on the scene, matters are altered. He crowds the country with animals. He hurries up their growth and increases the demands they make on the soil. A modern cow gives about a thousand gallons of milk at one lactation period, and produces her first calf at about three years; the native cattle of Africa do not breed till they are six, and yield at most three hundred gallons of milk at one lactation. And too often he ships off the meat, bone-meal, cheese leather, and wool without putting anything back in the soil. He forgets that all their mineral ingredients have come out of the soil. A country that is exporting grassland products is also exporting grassland fertility. There are large areas which are naturally deficient in minerals; but man has been creating mineral-deficiency over other and vaster areas.

Despite its dismal environmental record (or perhaps because of it), England remained the vanguard of ecological thought. In 1931, England’s scientific world met with Nikolai Bukharin, a vanguard figure of the Russian revolution. Unlike Leon Trotsky, whose ecomodernism led him to embrace atomic power in 1926 and “enlightened” eugenics in 1934, Bukharin applied dialectical materialism to both the natural and social world.

In 1921, he wrote “Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology” to help develop a social science that could contend with that of the bourgeoisie. The work is startling for its grasp of the kind of environmental threats the U.N. warned about in a highly publicized report released to the public on May 6th. Bukharin wrote:

The world being in constant motion, we must consider phenomena in their mutual relations, and not as isolated cases. All portions of the universe are actually related to each other and exert an influence on each other. The slightest motion, the slightest alteration in one place, simultaneously changes everything else. The change may be great or small – that is another matter – at any rate, there is a change. For example: let us say the Volga forests have been cut down by men. The result is that less water is retained by the soil, with a resulting partial change in climate; the Volga “runs dry,” navigation on its waters becomes more difficult, making necessary the use, and therefore the production, of dredging machinery; more persons are employed in the manufacture of such machinery; on the other hand, the animals formerly living in the forests disappear; new animals, formerly not dwelling in these regions, put in their appearance; the former animals have either died out or migrated to forest areas, etc.; and we may go even further: with a change in climate, it is clear that the condition of the entire planet has been changed, and therefore an alteration in the Volga climate to a certain extent changes the universal climate. Further, if the map of the world is changed to the slightest extent, this involves also a change – we must even suppose – in the relations between the earth and the moon or sun, etc., etc.

In 1931, the British scientific left convened the Second International Conference on the History of Science and Technology held in London in 1931. Bukharin brought along a Soviet delegation of eight scientists that included the USSR’s best-known physicist, A. F. Joffe, and best-known biologist/geneticist, N. I. Vavilov. Vavilov gave a rousing speech on the Soviet discovery of germplasm for major cultivated plants. Soviet scientists searched for the earliest agricultural cultivation, based on the theory that this would identify the areas with the greatest genetic diversity.

Bukharin’s delivered a paper titled “Theory and Practice from the Standpoint of Dialectical Materialism” that had little to with Stalinist dogma. It began with the statement that “The crisis of present-day capitalist economy has produced a most profound crisis in the whole of capitalist culture; a crisis in individual branches of science, a crisis in epistemology, a crisis in world outlook, a crisis in world feeling.” This crisis continues to this day.

However, the biggest impact on the British left during the conference came from the physicist Boris Hessen who delivered a paper titled “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s ‘Principia’” that placed Newton’s discoveries within the context of the socio-economic backdrop of 17^th and 18^th century Britain. Hessen’s paper became a major influence on the thinking of three of the great scientists of the left attending the conference: J.B.S. Haldane, J.D. Bernal, and Joseph Needham. They all had ties to the Communist Party but never to the point of allowing Soviet dogma to derail their work.

In one of the more fascinating passages in “The Return of Nature,” Foster reviews the cold war climate that ostracized the British scientists who dared to identify with the USSR. As was the case with the CIA intervening in the literature and art world to discredit the admittedly stultifying character of Soviet culture, anti-Communists took aim at the British leftist scientists, especially their opposition to nuclear war.

A campaign against “Bernalism” began long before the Cold War. In the fall of 1940, John R. Baker, an Oxford zoologist, eugenicist, and virulent anti-Communist, wrote a letter to forty-nine prominent British warning about Bernalism. Two of the scientists aroused by the letter formed a triumvirate with Baker against the Marxists. One was Baker’s Oxford colleague, the ecologist Arthur Tansley. The other was the chemist Michael Polanyi, Karl Polanyi’s brother. In 1941, they founded a group called the Society for Freedom in Science (SFS) that referred to their opponents as “gangsters” and argued against planning in science and condemned the Soviet Union.

After WWII ended, the three escalated their attack, no doubt fired up by Winston Churchill’s bellicose Iron Curtain speech. Baker and Polanyi were the hard-core anti-Communists, while Tansley was a rightwing social democrat. In a letter to a colleague during the war, Baker wrote, ““I do not at all appreciate our alliance with the USSR. I should have preferred to have nothing to do with her, whatever the consequences. The regime seems to me more evil . . . than . . . [Hitler’s] Germany.”

Baker and Polanyi were followers of Hayek’s economics. It was a mutual admiration society with Hayek inviting Polanyi to the neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society’s founding meeting in Switzerland. In 1950, In 1950, rightwing intellectuals founded the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). The CIA used the Rockefeller Foundation as cover to provide funding for the CCF, which in turn dispensed funding to allied groups, including the SFS.

Hayek, Polanyi, and Baker were all directly involved with the CCF, with Polanyi playing a leading role throughout. He was president of the organizing committee for a 1953 CCF meeting in Hamburg, under the theme of Science and Freedom. This first large meeting of the CCF drew120 scholars and scientists, along with professional anti-Communists such as French philosopher Raymond Aron and ex-Marxist Sidney Hook.

In their ongoing crusade against the British scientific left, they anticipated the “science wars” of the 1980s and 90s that pitted scientists such as Paul Gross and Norman Levitt against men and women they dismissed as “relativists”. They wrote a book titled “Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science” that helped shape the agenda of a conference at NYU on the “science wars” funded by the Olin Foundation. Levitt got the ear of an NYU physics professor who wrote a postmodernist spoof for Social Text, a journal that included it as part of a special issue on the “science wars.”

Many people on the left, including me, cheered for Sokal because we hated postmodernist obfuscation. However, I eventually learned that the Social Text issue hardly conformed to Sokal’s stereotype. It contained an article by Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins that defended the kind of analysis the British scientific left pioneered and that eventually led to the formation of the New Left Science for the People. In his Epilogue, Foster pays tribute to Lewontin, Levins, and Science for the People’s legacy. Let me conclude with Foster’s call for a renewed spirit of ecosocialist theory and activism:

As an organization, Science for the People was known for the intellectual stars with which it was associated, including such giants in their fields as Rita Arditti, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Stephen Jay Gould, Ruth Hubbard, Richard Levins, and Richard Lewontin. In particular, Levins, Lewontin, and Gould, all of whom took up positions at Harvard, then the leading center for evolutionary biology, were to become known for the creative ways in which they drew on the dialectical, historical, and materialist views of Marxism (as well as other influences such as Darwinism) to develop their evolutionary and ecological critiques. In many ways, this constituted a further iteration, but in startlingly new ways, of the dialectic of nature and society, symbolized by the Marx-Darwin relation, that had so engaged Engels and the British Marxist scientists of the 1930s. It manifested itself practically in strong research-based repudiations of crude mechanism, idealism (teleology), and racialism in science, along with exposing the inherent misuse of science in a capitalist society.

As part of the mass movement against capitalist barbarism today, scientists of the left will respond in the same way that earlier generations did. Given the anti-scientific miasma deepening each day in Washington, they can’t remain in an ivory tower. We should never forget that in addition to being a blow against war and feudal privileges, the Russian Revolution was an attempt to build a society based on scientific principles. No amount of idealism could overcome the obstacles placed in the path of Lenin, Bukharin, Trotsky and other revolutionaries. Today, a revolution in a country like the USA will not have to worry about 21 invading counter-revolutionary armies. For the first time in human history, the construction of a socialist society will be feasible. I urge you to read John Bellamy Foster’s “The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology” as an essential guide to how earlier generations saw such a task.

Louis Proyect blogs at Louisproyect.org and is the moderator of the Marxism mailing list. In his spare time, he reviews films for CounterPunch.

Review of ‘Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution’ by Don Fitz

by STAN COX COUNTERPUNCH

Don Fitz’s new book Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution was going to press at Monthly Review in early spring, as the pandemic was ramping up, so he had just barely enough time to slip in a postscript teasingly titled, “How Che Guevara Taught Cuba to Confront COVID-19.” The postscript puts an exclamation mark on the medical history of Cuba that Fitz takes us through in the 240 compelling pages that come before. Based on that history, one would have expected Cuba to take early, decisive actions to stem the pandemic, and Fitz says that’s exactly what happened.

The government quickly converted school-uniform factories to manufacture medical masks. They sacrificed their crucial tourism industry in order to bar all non-resident travel. They locked down hotspots, ensuring that their residents were well provisioned and that medically vulnerable people were checked frequently. They did plenty of testing and contact tracing. Medical students walked through all neighborhoods regularly, checking in on residents. All of this, Fitz writes, was no more than what Cubans would have expected of their nation in a time of such danger. He adds, “The Cuban people would not tolerate the head of the country ignoring medical advice, spouting nonsensical statements, and determining policy based on what would be most profitable for corporations.” Indeed, their pandemic response is only the latest of countless ways in which the Cuban medical system has proven superior to the US system.

The medical system that Cuba’s revolutionaries inherited from the old regime—more like a non-system—was a mess. Millions of Cubans, disproportionately rural and Black, has no access to health care at all. In the 1960s, the government began building a national system of outpatient polyclinics (policlínicos integrales) designed, in Fitz’s words, to “unify preventive and curative medicine” in communities. Each polyclinic was staffed, at a minimum, with “a general practice physician, nurse, pediatrician, OB/GYN, and social workers.” The polyclinics provided a single point of entry for each patient. They were highly successful, Fitz says, because they were established not in isolation but in the context of other developments: Cuba’s famously successful literacy campaign, land reform, improved farm incomes, improved diets, pensions, improved water supplies, schools, and housing, along with others. Having status within the national system equal to that of the country’s major hospitals, polyclinics had a high degree of independence. In the mid-1970s, the polyclinics began doing health risk assessments, incorporated specialist care, and made house calls a major part of the system. A decade later, single doctor-nurse teams began establishing small neighborhood consultarios, each tied to a polyclinic.

Internationally, Cuba’s health professionals are most well-known for their numerous, extensive missions to provide medical care and training in underserved or war-torn regions. The international work began in 1962 with a mission to Algeria, followed by other African nations, but it really ramped up with Cuba’s involvement in the Angola war that began in 1975 and dragged on into the 1980s. Fitz provides a richly detailed story of Cuban troops’ support for the Angolans’ fight against U.S.- and apartheid South Africa-supported rebels backed by South African mercenaries. The number of Cuban fighters in Angola reached a peak of 36,000 in 1976. Between 1975 and 1991, Cuba also sent more than 43,000 aid workers; among them, the number of Cuban medical workers in the country at any given time was as high as 800. Fitz relates some fascinating personal stories of doctors who served in the country, some of them for years. Cuban medical missions remained in Angola until 1991.

The Angola mission is the most celebrated, but Cuba’s service to Africa was far more widespread. Fitz list two dozen of the continent’s countries who collectively hosted tens of thousands of Cuban aid missions, primarily medical. They spanned the continent and the alphabet, from Benin to Guinea-Bissau to Mali to Uganda to Zambia. In the 1970s and 1980s, Cuban doctors also went to serve the revolutions in Nicaragua and Grenada. In the wake of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine, the Cuban government flew in 25,000 victims, mostly children, for treatment. In all, 164,000 medical professionals have served in 154 countries. Cuba provided medical teams in the wake of Hurricane Mitch, which hit Central America in 1999, the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and other disasters. They assembled a team to go to the US after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, but George W. Bush rejected the offer.

Fitz relates the Cuban medical system’s long struggle with HIV/AIDS. The disease had become serious on the island by 1986, but its cause still mysterious enough that the health system began sending AIDS patients to be quarantined in a network of sanitoria previously established for patients with highly infective diseases. Most of the quarantined were soldiers returning from Africa, so there was little notice within Cuba. The United States, always on the lookout for a club to beat Castro with, denounced Cuba for abusing the human rights of gay men. In fact, the majority of infected troops were heterosexual. The quarantine was lifted in 1989, once the disease became better understood. Cuba eventually made good progress on AIDS. The medical journal The Lancet declared Cuba’s AIDS program “among the most effective in the world.” But Cuba’s enemies continued to throw out the anti-gay trope, Fitz believes, “to distract attention from the fact that Cuba had implemented a program to combat HIV/AIDS that was better than most countries’, and, in particular, superior to US efforts.”

Fitz discusses how the collapse of the Soviet Union—which, combined with the continuing US embargo, ushered in the severe economic stresses of Cuba’s “Special Period” —placed an unprecedented burden on the superior health-care system the country had built up over three decades. The most serious health problems were a deeply inadequate food supply and shortages of drugs and medical equipment. Despite fiscal strains, writes Fitz, no hospitals were closed during the Special Period, and all regions, even in the countryside, had access to medical care. He also presents a table showing that infant mortality continued its longstanding, steady decrease through the hard years of the 1990s, and that since 2000, Cuba’s infant mortality rate has been significantly lower than that of the United States. Also in this period, the country’s huge increase in urban and small-scale food production was widely celebrated.

Over the past decade, Fitz has done much on-the-ground reporting on Cuba’s medical education system, led by its Latin American School of medicine (ELAM), and here he provides a detailed history of the system and its achievements, enlivened by extensive firsthand interviews with faculty and profiles of more than a dozen medical students.

A chapter comparing the US and Cuban medical systems features some eye-popping cost numbers: hospital stay, $1900 in US and $5 in Cuba; hernia surgery, $12,000 in US and $14 in Cuba; hip fracture, $14,000 in US and $72 in Cuba. In 2018, when the US was spending $8300 per person per year on medical care, Cuba was spending a little over $400. Fitz points out the reasons the US medical economy is so broken: insurance for profit, not health; overdiagnosis, overtreatment, over-prescribing of drugs, and overpricing; treatments that create problems requiring more treatment; the excessive salaries received by doctors and administrators; and excess profits going to owners and investors. The result: a health-care system that achieves worse performance than a highly effective one that costs 5 percent as much.

Finally, Fitz lists ten lessons to be drawn from the Cuban health-care experience, writing that “They form the basis of what I call the New Global Medicine.” Among those lessons are that health care need not be dependent on costly technology; doctors must live in the communities where they work; the medical system must be evolving and unique to each community; international medical aid must be adapted to the political climate of the host country; doctors must put healing above personal wealth; and “the new global medicine is a microcosm of how a few thousand revolutionaries can change the world.”

As the question of how to fix the US health care system resurges in the coming year, before the Covid-19 has yet passed and before new medical emergencies arise, Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution should be read as widely as possible—by lawmakers and their staffs, yes, but more importantly, by those of us who elect those lawmaker 

Stan Cox is the author of The Green New Deal and Beyond : Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can (City Lights, May, 2020) and one of the editors of Green Social Thought, where this piece first ran

s.

Liberal Establishment Promotes

 “HERD IMMUNITY-lite”

by ELIZABETH KEYES  COUNTERPUNCH

(Of course it doesn’t work that way, but it sounds “lesser evil”!)

 SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

Human lives are cheap in a capitalist society, particularly for members of the working class.

The ruling class is obviously willing to play “Russian roulette” with the very lives of the working class.

Some of the doomed, early “victim-players” will be (and have already been) teachers and students as both corporate parties recklessly (homicidally) endorse premature school reopenings. But the Democratic Party, like with its wars, will put a humanitarian spin on it. “The poor children desperately need their educational environments be returned to them.” As if the quality of life of the children of the working class seriously matters to our ruling class elites.

The “poor children” … pawns in the capitalistic game of getting the working parents back to the workplace to grind out profits for the rich elites who incidentally just enjoyed another obscenely large windfall bailout thanks to their donor-loyal, bipartisan DC politicians at the struggling US taxpayer’s expense.

The “hybrid” (“lesser evil” sounding) NYC school reopening plan of part-time, alternating and/or partial attendance, a futile liberal establishment attempt to thwart a vicious coronavirus, I hear was particularly pitched by AFT union president Randi Weingarten (salary of $500,000 a year and a member of the DNC).

How long are we as citizens going to keep minimizing inhumane policies promoted by the liberal establishment – its politicians, media, union leaders, et al. – simply because they are not directly endorsed by the admittedly and gobsmackingly repellent and fascistic Donald Trump and his immediate cabal?

“Lesser evilism” has jumped the proverbial shark at this point in “killer-capitalism America”! It is long past time to acknowledge that.

Here is a compelling statement about Democratic New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s K-12 public school reopening policy from the newly organized The New York City Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee posted on the wsws.org website entitled, “New York City educators launch safety committee to halt the reopening of schools.”

“The opening of schools for more than 1 million students directly places the lives of educators, school workers, students and the broader community at grave risk for the sake of corporate profit.

“The criminal decision promises to re-infect the population of the largest metropolitan region in the US with a population of 20 million people. The horrific scenes from March, April and May, when mass graves were dug on Hart Island, when hospitals were overwhelmed and healthcare infrastructure was brought to the verge of collapse, will soon be repeated unless we mobilize the working class to put an end to these homicidal policies. The city alone has lost nearly 24,000 people to the virus, the majority of whom were working class residents.”

Another compelling statement from Alberto Escalera in an article entitled Mounting opposition to school reopenings as 55 New York City teachers test positive for COVID-19:

“By imposing a school reopening with in-person classes in New York City, with a student population of 1.1 million, de Blasio is attempting to normalize death among teachers and children. He spelled this out in a press conference Monday morning, stating “Some people will test positive … We have to remember that for the very small percentage of the people who test positive for the Coronavirus, it is a very temporary reality.

“In pressing for the resumption of in-person learning in New York City, the ruling class aims to set a precedent to follow for reopenings in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, and every other district across the country that is starting their semester with online instruction.”

Mr. Escalera declares:

“The explosion of COVID-19 cases among teachers across the city was entirely predictable given the widespread outbreaks that have taken place in K-12 districts and college campuses across the United States during the past month.”

This is an inconvenient reality for the entire capitalist establishment, of course, as desperate teachers across the country are organizing against resumed in-person school reopenings.

To whom can teachers turn for help in saving their very lives and those of their students and fellow employees?

Certainly not the corporate Democratic Party, nor the Republican one, of course.

How about turning to their fellow citizens who too often remain ignorant of the particular horrors of the plights of special sections of American society, often because of our corporate-enabling media, or because too many citizens are simply too morally lazy in a culture of “Meh… it could be worse. It could be happening directly to me” – so naively and coldly detached in their narcissistic comfort zones?

So many decades of foreign innocents dying from US imperialism with the enabling ignorance and/or indifference of our American society.

Now arrives the decade of mass American deaths from US capitalism on our own turf. Will the numbness — the obtuseness — of the citizenry continue on?

Mr. Escalera explains that a “deal” was made between Democratic Party NYC Mayor de Blasio and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) on September 8, BEHIND THE BACKS OF THE RANK AND FILE NYC TEACHERS, not to resume in-person instruction of K-12 public school classes until September 21. The deal was struck to “derail” an anticipated teachers’ strike.

Apparently the postponement gave oxygen to the political bullshit that the New York City mayoral and school administrations and unions could adequately address all safety issues in all schools for all teachers, students and staffers. 1,800 facilities.

Let me know if you are interested in purchasing a bridge that extends from Manhattan to Brooklyn — cheap.

The assurances of safety issues being earnestly pursued and accomplished by the say-anything politicians and their puppet union officials unsurprisingly have amounted to pathetic half-measures or straight-out lies.

Except now we are talking about people’s very lives being at stake from this criminal irresponsibility. We are talking about collusion to commit mass, negligent homicide.

Of course, in a capitalist society, this heinous crime escapes accountability! Profits over human lives. Thanks to our amoral politicians pimped out to their corporate donors and to an equally amoral corporate media owned by said corporate donors, justice is not a priority. It is often the enemy of maximum profit-making for the obscenely rich and powerful.

I attended an on-line meeting of the newly organized The New York City Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee on Wednesday night and my already concern for premature NYC school reopenings was intensified. During the meeting, many frustrated school employees expressed anecdotal evidence that there is in no way adequate preparation for the NYC school reopenings being accomplished. Not by a long shot.

I learned that even before this imminent September 21 reopening, in 56 district schools teachers and school staff have already tested positive for COVID-19. The classes haven’t even officially started yet. These people were required to show up for preparation duty before they had even received their COVID-19 test results, which length of time fell far short – or rather “long” – of the promises of the lying city and union officials.

I learned of reports from school custodians that the PPE equipment they have been provided with is seriously inadequate. Due to budget cuts, some custodians sometimes have to cover two buildings. How can they possibly cover “extra measures” for safety – “deep cleaning” – when they already are so far stretched?

There are reports of hundreds of cases of inadequate ventilation in the 1,800 school facilities involved. 1000s of safety hazards have been reported.

But the Department of Education (DOE) has greenlighted every facility for the September 21 reopenings.

Alberto Escalera describes one NYC school, Murry Bergtraum Campus located in lower Manhattan.

“Among the many unsafe conditions within the building, educators highlight that none of the windows are functional and only 50% of the 225 offices and classroom spaces within the facility are “operational.” The building, which has a student population of approximately 1,000, has no unit ventilators and only two usable bathrooms that must be shared by students and staff. Despite these conditions, the DOE has deemed the building ready to receive students for in-person classes on September 21.”

One call-in, 20-year serving, female school bus driver lamented that she had been informed she now is responsible for disinfecting her own bus, and without being provided with cleaning supplies. Also, she explained that if she pulls up to a stop of 20 students, some without masks, she is expected to jam them all onboard.

I learned during this meeting that apparently there will be a DOE “situation room” which will make all executive decisions related to the school reopening scenario. What could possibly go wrong there in terms of slowness of response time and/or indifference to emergencies from afar?

The DOE along with the de Blasio administration both participated in the scandalous minimization of the pandemic and urgency to close schools at the beginning of the year, when the reality of the grave danger of the pandemic (what Woodward’s new book has confirmed) was already buzzing about in the inner circles of political power (and not just Trump’s!).

One of the speakers at the meeting stressed that once the New York City model of premature school reopenings is established – and the deaths of teachers and children “normalized” as Escalera accuses — online instruction will soon enough be ended in cities across the country.

Many, many more people will die, unless this new premature reopening policy is successfully combatted now.

Another speaker mentioned how students at the University of Michigan were striking against the school reopening despite the lack of corporate media acknowledgement. This strike is resonating with college students across the country. Of course, the establishment is ever ready to scapegoat college students as being reckless in not honoring social distancing, and any inevitable upticks in coronavirus statistics among them will be blamed directly on them, rather than the perpetrators of the homicidal reopening, this same speaker pointed out.

One teacher mentioned that it was due to some teachers taking Christmas vacations abroad last year that they became seriously aware while in other countries (that were not suppressing the coronavirus danger as the USA was) of what they were up against upon their return to their thankless and capitalism, cannon-fodder roles as US teachers.

Teachers in NYC and elsewhere are taking heroic risks such as protesting outside their schools, organizing petitions and rank and file committees, and doing whistleblowing about the grim reality of the pandemic threat in our schools, all of which can have dire economic consequences for them. They are in a desperate situation of fighting for their very lives and the lives of their students along with the networks surrounding them, which ultimately, to any critical thinking American, includes us all.

The on-line meeting was launched with eight proposals submitted by The New York City Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee.

I have to admit, as radicalized and socialistic as I have become, my jaw dropped that these proposals could even be expressed in our capitalism “learned helpless” and beaten-down anti-social and anti-economic justice society. I immediately imagined a hungry Oliver Twist extending his bowl “for more” to an astonished but brutal authority figure.

The Committee is right to demand such profound socialistic changes, because trying to reform psychopathic capitalism is a non-starter.

We need to say and to hear what we deserve as US citizens, not what the oligarchy avariciously demands we put up with.

We, as exploited Americans, all need to start asking for a lot more.

We need to call out the gobsmacking degree of uncivilized policies against the working class in America by BOTH corporate donor-driven parties.

The Committee’s proposals include:

Suspending all in-person course school instruction and providing adequate and free computer hardware and high speed wifi access to all students.

Full income protections and security to all workers in NYC. Income protections to parents ensuring their children’s participation in online school processes.

The freezing of college tuition and the abolishment of student debt. Free campus housing with meals. Protections and accommodations for international college students now in America dealing with the issues of the pandemic.

Full protection and support for all undocumented workers and their children. A halt to their imprisonment and deportation.

Democratically-made decisions on educational policies with all parties involved, especially teachers, parents and students.

A halt to all non-essential production. Advanced safety precautions must be provided for all essential workers.

A demand for the retro-fitting of all classrooms in terms of ventilation and air purification.

This last cost, among any others included above, should come from the profits of the oligarchy, the proposal insists.

IMAGINE THAT????????

Who will defend our teachers and students? Who will defend the working class? Who will curb the outrageous injustices perpetrated by the oligarchs and their pimped out political and media puppets?

Well, I signed up to support The New York City Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee by emailing educators@wsws.org. I recommend you do the same!

The clock is ticking. 200,000 Americans have died since the beginning of the year. Are we really heading for 400,000 deaths by the end of it? (At the current exponential rate, so it would seem. Someone should explain the math to the amiably and willfully obtuse NYC Mayor de Blasio!)

I want to be part of the solution to stop these mass, gratuitous deaths, not contribute to the deadweight (pun bitterly intended) of the problem!

I want to be on the right side of history.

I want a country where I am not, on a daily basis, distracted from life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness by the goal of avoiding death, along with the passive enabling of it for tens of thousands of innocent others!

Vaccines for the Rich

by CHRISTOPHER BRAUCHLI 

 SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

Self-interest speaks all sorts of tongues, and plays all sorts of roles, even that of disinterestedness.

– François Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Reflections    

It was a disappointing headline, but it didn’t come as much of a surprise. It appeared in the Wall Street Journal on September 1, 2020.  It was short and to the point.  “Nations With Wealth Tie Up Vaccine Doses.” That which could be considered a harbinger of the headline, insofar as the United States is concerned, had occurred almost four months earlier.

On May 18, 2020, the trump told  the World Health Organization Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus,  that if the WHO didn’t make “major substantive improvements” within 30 days the United States would permanently withhold future funding and withdraw from the organization. Always eager to follow through on threats, and by nature, impatient,  the trump concluded he could not wait the full 30 days.  On May 29^th he announced that he was terminating the relationship with the WHO immediately and was withholding all future funding.  He did not address what arrangements he planned to make for the United States to pay the $203 million it owed for 2020 and previous years.

Although this was not addressed in the withdrawal announcement, we have now learned that in addition to saving money by no longer participating in the WHO, the trump is declining to participate in the WHO’s efforts to find a vaccine to treat the pandemic. One hundred seventy-two nations have signed up to be part of a global effort led by the WHO to develop, manufacture and equitably distribute a coronavirus vaccine known as the Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access (Covax) Facility. The critical word in that description is “equitable.”  The undertaking  is a joint effort and when a vaccine is found that is effective and safe, all the participants in the project will be promised enough vaccine to cover 20% of their populations.  The vaccine will first be distributed to the high-risk segments of the population of each participating country. It is hoped that there will be 2 billion doses available by the end of 2021.

The WHO project is important for all the participants, but it is especially important for the small nations that are unable to develop or acquire a developed vaccine on their own. By not permitting the United States to participate,  the trump is depriving the WHO effort of funding it desperately needs to develop the vaccine.  It is also letting it be known that since it is a project of the WHO, the trump doesn’t  care what happens to those who will suffer if the project sponsored by the WHO is unsuccessful because of its lack of funding.

Trump’s refusal to participate is not, as one might suppose, the result of mindless truculence.  His refusal was eloquently explained by a spokesman for the White House who said: “The United States will continue to engage our international partners to ensure we defeat this virus, but we will not be constrained by multilateral organizations influenced by the corrupt World Health Organization and China.”

By taking this approach the trump is betting on the United States coming up with its own vaccine before those working with the WHO.  Should the WHO win the race, the United States  would not be entitled to share in the vaccines developed by the WHO. That is not terribly worrisome for the trump.  That is because the trump, the European Union, Japan and the UK have already entered into contracts with Western drug makers to purchase 3.7 billion doses of vaccine even though the vaccines have not yet been developed. The purchase agreements include options to buy additional doses.  The assumption is that the companies which have  contracts will be successful in developing vaccines before the consortium led by the WHO.

Developing countries have reason to be concerned as the WSJ headline suggests.  If the consortium led by the United States beats the WHO to the punch, the less developed countries will be left out. As the assistant director-general at the WHO said, when discussing the upcoming competition to develop the vaccine:   “Next year is a year of scarce resources.  Whatever we have, it won’t be enough to vaccinate everyone.  It is in everybody’s self-interest to collaborate globally because we need this pandemic controlled in all countries.”  The trump and his cronies are oblivious to this need.  In a press briefing in June, an administration official said:  “Let’s take care of Americans first.  To the extent there is surplus, we have an interest in ensuring folks around the world are vaccinated.”

As with so many trumpian statements and actions, the trump and his cronies have shown us yet another way the trump is making America great again.  And it gives us all the rest of us cause to pause and consider whether we want to continue to live in a country the greatness of which is being defined by a man of no character and puny intellect.